Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution

The last great underground cultural movement of the pre-Internet age, Riot Grrrl revolutionized girlhood itself. In the early 1990s, young women were realizing that the equality they’d been promised was still elusive, and a newly resurgent right wing was turning feminism into the ultimate dirty word.

Riot Grrrl roared into the spotlight in 1991: an uncompromising movement of pissed-off girls with no patience for sexism and no intention of keeping quiet. They published zines, founded local groups, and organized national conventions, while fiercely prophetic punk bands such as Bratmobile, Heavens to Betsy, Huggy Bear, and Bikini Kill helped spread the word across the US and to Canada, Europe, and beyond.

GIRLS TO THE FRONT (Harper) is the first-ever history of Riot Grrrl—lyrical and infused with punk, it tells the story of a group of extraordinary young women coming of age and coming into their own. Part social history, part cultural criticism, and part collective biography, this passionate narrative takes us from the front row of a punk show to the stage of the Republican Convention; from a seedy strip club to the US Supreme Court. It tells the tale of a time when America thought feminism was dead, but a generation of noisy girls rose up to prove everybody wrong. Deftly weaving together a wide range of political and cultural histories, this is a dynamic chronicle not just of a movement but of an era.